Today's network service providers face extraordinary challenges. Traffic levels are rapidly increasing. Both consumers and corporations are demanding higher access rates and staying on the Internet longer while looking for predictable performance and stringent service-level guarantees. This puts direct demands on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide larger capacity and higher speed at their point of presence (POP) locations, preferably without compromising performance.
Just to maintain acceptable performance, service providers are adding support for more users, more traffic, and more transactions, preferably without introducing bottlenecks or compromising network availability. Many network-based businesses transactions are time-critical and typically cannot tolerate undue delay or disruption.
In addition to the challenge of growing traffic levels is the challenge of growing diversity of network technology. Users may access the public infrastructure, for example, over dial-up connections, ISDN links, leased lines, frame relays, ATM virtual circuits. They may use voice-grade modems, cable modems, a variety of xDSL modems, or other modems. Within the infrastructure, a service provider's POP may attach to the core network and to other devices in the POP using, for example, ATM, frame relay, or Ethernet.
Supporting each type of network technology in a traditional manner means that the ISPs typically add separate access servers, access routers, and/or stand alone LAN switches, generally resulting in an increase in cost and management complexities for the ISP.
Furthermore, in current switching technology, layer two protocols are not independent of the physical interfaces they run on. Ports are generally pre-configured and tied to one protocol and only one protocol at compile time.
Accordingly, there is a need for network switch capable of providing fault-tolerant and efficient services that will accommodate the increase in the number and the variety of network traffic. Such a switch should preferably also allow ports to be dynamically configured at runtime.